Mikhail Bakhtin

Almost nothing in this world is created. Most literary works are adaptations of existing ideas or issues. In other words, the main point, or points, behind the story can be found in the real world in some shape or form. However, the way in which they are expressed is when imagination, “the gothic”, and “the ‘Carnivalesque’” play a role and new ways in which the message is told is established. Victor Fleming’s Wizard of Oz is no exception, and his movie represents the American ideal of “America…

Because of its social and political aspects, Kalidar is a modern work that has some characteristics of Greek romance, in its Bakhtinian definition, such as the importance of chance, fate, and “sudden time.” Bakhtin uses two terms in order to explain the time in Greek romance, “suddenly” and “at just that moment” (Dialogic Imagination 95). From them, he concludes with the other concept, “adventuristic chance time” through which human life changes mostly based on chance (Ibid 94). Moreover, the…

Catherine Belsey refers to realist literature as a text which ‘positions itself between the facts and a type of illusion through a representation of a simulated reality which could be possible but not real’ . Whilst critically dissecting typical doctrines of classic realism, this essay will discuss the extent to which Dostoevsky conforms or subverts to the realist tropes in Crime and Punishment . Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle propose that realist characters should be ‘lifelike’; They…

Language plays a significant role and it serves a variety of functions in human society. In a broad sense, language is the symbol, the message, or the expression through which people can be communicated and meaning can be delivered. Human language is a very complex system and the communication through human language is one of the distinctive features of human beings. In a narrow sense, language refers to the spoken words, the speech as the media of communication and interaction among people in…

cultural view is rightly similar to what Bhabha puts forward in “Signs Taken for Wonders: The Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May1817”—the concept of hybridity. In it, Bhabha, by applying some theories from many theorists, M. Bakhtin, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault in particular, has successfully demonstrated that hybridity exists in the colonial authoritative discourse and the possibility of resistance it brings…

written by college professor, Zuyan Zhou explaining how Monkey and the other characters and stories of The Journey to the West share many parallels with Western carnival in “season, duration, form and influence”(69). While analyzing the works of Mikhail Bakhtin, Zhou comes to many conclusions regarding the idea that The Journey to the West, a well known Chinese novel, is a representation of carnivalistic style and energy. He claims that the story of Monkey’s journey is a representation of many…

Idiot coincided with Dostoyevsky’s financial hardships which forced him and his wife Anna to move temporarily to Europe. Being in Europe and experiencing the constant lack of means, Dostoyevsky continuously maintained correspondence with his brother Mikhail, his close friend Maikov and his niece Sonia to whom he often confessed about his futile attempts to write a great novel and about the disappointing mediocrity he was receiving instead (Frank 245). In fact, Dostoyevsky dedicated The Idiot to…

In Matthew Immergut’s article, “Manscaping,” he often refers to the idea of classical and grotesque bodies. This idea comes from the Russian social theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin. Classical bodies refer to the clean, sculpted, and hairless bodies we may picture when thinking of a Greek statue or the more modern version may be a Calvin Klein model. Grotesque bodies refer to hairy, untamed, primitive, and animal-like bodies…

Point of View. Who sees? Who speaks? Why? Point of view, in literary terms, is the perspective from which a narrative is told. The choice of point of view in fiction is probably the single most important decision a writer must make. This choice will bend and shape the narrative, control the storytelling and fundamentally affect the way the reader will respond to the characters. Percy Lubbock called point of view the “relation in which the narrator stands to the story” (Craft Of Fiction 1955…

Don Juan, published periodically, branches across many genres, using their conventions as its own pleasure to generate a shockingly unique work from an amalgamation of many pre-existing genres through the appropriation of their conventions. To Mikhail Bakhtin the novel “lay so far outside…